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The following articles are both excerpted and adapted from Steve’s new book, Six Blind Elephants: Understanding Ourselves and Each Other, Volume 1.
When someone follows this suggestion, they step out of the problem completely, and see it as an outside observer would. This places the problem external to them, where it can be examined more dispassionately. The only thing that stays the same is the structure of the problem, leaving behind all the judging, urgency, emotional response, etc.
Therapeutic metaphor is a similar way to shift to a completely different scope. A story is told about someone else, an animal, or even a choo-choo train, that has the same structure of meaning as the client’s situation or problem. Then the story is continued to reach some kind of resolution, which can be either specific or general.
The best metaphors are those in which the transition from the problem to a solution includes a dream, reverie, or other altered state to achieve a deep access to resources that are not conscious. Again the problem is placed outside the client, as if it were happening to someone else, making it easier to think of possible solutions.
A very similar way to separate from a problem has been presented prominently by Michael White and David Epston, in what they call Narrative Therapy. In their kind of externalization, someone’s symptom is described as being outside of them and personified.
For instance, a child who shits in his pants is told that his problem results from the activities of “sneaky poo,” an invisible entity that sneaks up on him and makes him shit in his pants. The child is encouraged to further objectify sneaky poo by telling a story about sneaky poo, drawing pictures of him, speculating about his characteristics and motives, etc.—when and where it most likes to sneak up on the child, and what its intentions are. With this little bit of information about this intervention, think about how it changes the scope of the problem, not only for the child, but also for the parents, and the therapist....
If we expand the scope of our thinking to the events that occurred before the parents bring a child into therapy with this problem, we can safely assume that it has been very unpleasant for both parents and child, so both have a lot of strong feelings about it. The parents have probably tried to solve the problem by punishing the child in a variety of ways, perhaps including blaming and shaming.
At the very least, there has been an opposition and struggle between the parents and the child, and of course this "control issue" may be an expression of a much wider struggle for control between the parents and the child. Since the child is much smaller and weaker, his major recourse is to behavior that is categorized as “not under his control.” That motivates him to maintain the “uncontrollable” behavior as part of his struggle for control.
The child may actually experience the symptom as uncontrollable, in the same way that an adult may feel that they can’t control their compulsion to overeat, get angry, use drugs, etc. Typically people make the mistake of trying to control this kind of behavior directly by opposing it with conscious willpower. It is much easier and more effective to change the response indirectly by changing the stimulus, or the meaning of the stimulus, that elicits the response.
Since “control” is a more general category that includes many other events besides where and when to take a dump, it is at a higher logical level. Once the problem migrates to this level of control—who will control whom—it is almost certain that both the parents and the child will forget that the child and the parents would both like him to have control over his dumps. Whenever people get into struggles about control, they usually forget that they only want control in order to satisfy some other need or desire, a narrow scope that is not useful. Because control presupposes an opposition, they are even less likely to think about how their desires could be the same as someone else’s, which would be a useful expansion of the scope of their thinking.
In externalization, the most obvious change in scope is that the problem is now located outside the child in space. This is a process of dissociation, or separation from the problem, which typically results in less intense and more useful feeling responses. Dissociation is a generally useful initial intervention in any situation in which emotions are strong.
Presumably both the child and the parents have enough contact with reality to realize that sneaky poo is fictional-even when they talk about it as if it were real. This “as if” categorization, “This is not real” adds to the dissociation, resulting in a much more playful and creative attitude toward dealing with the problem itself. Take a minute or two to imagine interacting with a child with this problem as you introduce the idea of sneaky poo, and begin to explore with him how sneaky poo operates....
If you observe the look on the child’s face in your imagined scenario (which is also in the “as if” category) your unconscious mind has probably given you vivid information about how most kids would respond to this. (This is a very positive use of your “inner child.”)
Externalization also results in a change from the child being a problem, to having a problem. Often the child is described as being the problem, as in "problem child," a much larger scope that includes all the child’s behaviors. Externalization separates one behavior from the rest of the child’s behavior, an example of the useful distinction between self and behavior that is familiar to those in NLP. It is much easier to change a single behavior than it is to change someone’s entire self, a reduction in scope that literally makes the problem smaller, and easier to solve.
Externalization also changes the scope of the problem in time by locating it in the present, making any (potentially endless) therapeutic explorations into the “whys” of past traumas and causes irrelevant and obsolete. Focusing on the present limits scope in a useful way to what is happening now, and what can be done about it. This is much more elegant and effective than lecturing the parents (and perhaps the therapist too) about the futility of what Virginia Satir often called “archaeology, ” or a “visit to the museum. ”
Even more important, externalization changes the relationship between the child and his parents. When the problem was seen as being in the child, the parents’ attempts at changing the problem were directed at the child, creating opposition and struggle. The parents’ categorization of the child’s problem as something to be blamed, shamed, or punished not only distracts from the original problem, it adds to it, since those attempts are not likely to result in the child having resourceful feelings, high self-esteem or the ability to solve problems creatively.
Since sneaky poo is the one responsible, not the child, all the parents’ self-defeating efforts to change the child obviously and immediately become totally inappropriate-without saying a word about it! If the parents do persist in blaming and shaming, etc., they have to direct it at sneaky poo, rather than the child. Think about how much more effective and elegant this is than it would be to ask or tell the parents not to blame, shame, or punish. If they were simply told this—even with lots of good arguments and examples—they would usually have to make a conscious effort, and they would probably find it very difficult. Even if they managed to avoid using blaming words, blame would probably be conveyed in their tone of voice and other nonverbal behavior.
Furthermore, since sneaky poo is explicitly categorized as an entity whose goal is to make the child shit his pants, how can it be blamed for doing what it does? By categorizing sneaky poo’s actions as intentional (rather than uncontrollable or random) that opens up the possibility of exploring and finding out its positive intention, another very useful expansion of scope that will be familiar to those who have some knowledge of NLP. “Why do you suppose sneaky poo is doing this? I wonder what he really wants. ”
Previously the parents were opposing the child-no matter how benevolent and good-hearted they were. Now it is easy for the parents and the child and the therapist to all work together to oppose and outwit sneaky poo. They can examine the problem in great detail in order to understand it. Where, when, and with whom does it happen? What are its consequences? What is different about the exceptions when it doesn’t happen? What resources do the exceptions suggest, and how could those be used to alter the problem? etc.
This elegant intervention bypasses all the bad feelings, blaming, accusations of bad intent, etc., that typically occur in the struggle for control, and distract from examining the structure of the problem itself. It is very similar to Richard Bandler’s interesting recategorization of a problem as a learned skill that can be taught to others. “Let’s say I had to fill in for you for a day. What would I have to do to have your problem? Teach me how to do it. ”
Externalization can be used with a wide range of other problems, and with adults as well as children, and potentially can be used with any problem whatsoever. Instead of sneaky poo, you can use a gremlin, a ghost, or even an entity that already fits the client’s model of the world, like "the bottle" or “the needle” for drug abuse. Many alcoholics already blame “the bottle” and this is rightly called “denial” if it goes no further. But it is also a possible entry into discovering how it works and finding out how to alter the compulsion.
“OK, where and when does ’the bottle’ trip you up and control you, and where and when are you safe from it? What could you do to outwit the bottle? What is the bottle’s positive intent in getting you drunk? Is there some person or context that affords you complete protection from the bottle? For instance, would you be safe from the bottle if you were with your little daughter, or if you were in church?”
This is a perfect pace of the alcoholic’s experience, yet your questions expand the scope of their experience to include aspects that they can explore, learn from, and use to gain control of their behavior.
Other possible “ready-made” entities are trickster coyote for someone active in Native American traditions, or an anima or animus for someone familiar with Jungian thinking about the “shadow self” or “hidden dark side of the persona. ”
This short selection is adapted from Chapter 7 of Six Blind Elephants: Understanding Ourselves and Each Other, Volume I, by Steve Andreas. Other excerpts can be found at the following URL:
http://www.realpeoplepress.com/booklist/new.html
Other NLP articles by Steve can be found at http://www.steveandreas.com/cv.html#articles
Experiencing them as overlapping scopes can be a first step in integrating the two in your experience. Try the following experiment, taken from my book, Transforming Your Self: Becoming Who You Want to Be, pp. 237-238.
Most of us usually think of our minds being located in the brain, right? And then there is the rest of the body that is separate from the mind, so the mind is smaller than the body. Now try dissolving that boundary, however you represent it, and think of your mind flowing out and extending throughout your whole body, into every cell, right out to your fingertips and your toes, and everything in between, so that your mind becomes exactly as large as your body. As you do this, notice how that feels, and whether there might be some soft sound that accompanies this. . . .
That’s a really nice feeling, isn’t it? Mind and body are just different aspects of your whole functioning organism, and I’m sure you have all heard those words before. But what makes it really impact your experience is to see, feel, and hear your mind extending throughout your whole body. That’s a way to actually put your mind/body thinking back together, and reunite them.
Most of us also think of the heart as occupying only a small part of the body, but you can also extend your heart out to your fingertips in the same way, to experience your heart/mind/body. If you reach out and touch someone, you can feel yourself touching them with your heart and mind as well as with your body. Take a few minutes to experience what that is like, and include at least one example of a difficult or stressful situation in your experimenting. . . .
While most of us usually think of the mind as being smaller than the body, your mind is actually much larger. Your mind can include stars that are 13 billion light years distant, and it can be interesting to try extending your heart/mind/body identification far beyond your skin. We all do this to some extent, depending on what other people or things we include inside the boundaries of our identity. But what if your heart/mind/body included everything that you experience, so that all of that is felt as being inside you and part of you? Imagine that your heart/mind/body is so large that the most distant stars are within your fingertips! Take a couple of minutes to experience what that is like. . . .
This is the kind of experience that many mystics report, and I think it has a real basis, because everything you experience does take place in your heart/mind/body, even when you think of it as occurring outside you. Let’s follow Einstein, and try a little mind experiment. Imagine that an evil neurologist from the “dark side of the force” crept into your room last night while you were sleeping, anesthetized you, removed your brain, and put it into a nutrient solution and hooked up very sophisticated electrodes to all your sensory nerves, and then fed in all the detailed electrical inputs that exactly duplicated the experience of waking up and doing all the things you did today. How would you know the difference?
I assume that many of you have seen the movie “The Matrix,” which is based on this realization that all our experiences actually take place within our brains, even when we think of them as external. There are even mathematicians who claim to have proved that any brain with sufficient complexity is unable to distinguish whether there’s an “outside” or not. Our brains only get electrical signals from our senses, which we interpret to create our experience of external “reality.”
This process usually works quite well, and presumably there is an external reality outside of ourselves. We see a glass of milk on the table and when we reach out to grasp it, we feel it, and if we lift it to our lips and drink, we are not surprised to find that it tastes like milk and nourishes us.
So although we all have experiences that we describe as "other," or “outside of us,” or “external reality,” all of that actually happens inside our brains, and is a part of us, despite the separation that we usually assume.
So in one sense, we are each isolated universes unto ourselves. But in another, we are all one. And this is not an either/or choice, but a "both/and." As many mystics have said, you are already one with the world; it’s just a matter of realizing it. You all exist inside my brain and I exist in yours. You are all part of me, and I am a part of you. We are all connected together. As a friend of mine said once, “The human being has many bodies.” That’s a very different way of thinking, one that provides a very different and more unified perspective, and one that you might consider exploring, to find out where, and when, and how it could serve you. I have no idea whether it’s "true" or not, but if taking that perspective could be a useful choice for you, why not try it to find out?
This short selection is adapted from Chapter 7 of Six Blind Elephants: Understanding Ourselves and Each Other, Volume I, by Steve Andreas. Other excerpts can be found at the following URL:
http://www.realpeoplepress.com/booklist/new.html
Other NLP articles by Steve can be found at http://www.steveandreas.com/cv.html#articles
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